United States or New Zealand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
"I don't know. Curiosity, I suppose." "Well, I do advise you to go," said the girl. Shall you be there next Thursday?" "I? I never go to Mrs. Bevidge's Thursdays!" "Touche," said Jeff, and they both laughed. "Can you always get in at an enemy that way?" "Enemy?" "Well, friend. It's the same thing." "I see," said the girl. "You belong to the pessimistic school of Seniors."
Their faces were nearly on a level, as they looked into each other's eyes, and he kept seeing the play of the veil's edge against her lips as they talked. "Why sha'n't you go to Mrs. Bevidge's Thursdays?" she asked. "They're very nice." "How do you know I'm not going?" he retorted. "By the way you thanked her." "Do you advise me to go?" "I haven't got anything to do with it. What do mean by that?"
She asked: "Where had you met him?" "I met him first," said the girl, "at Willie Morland's tea, last week, and to-day I found him at Mrs. Bevidge's altruistic toot." "I didn't know," said her aunt, after a momentary attention to her tea, "that jays were interested in that sort of thing." The girl laughed. "I believe they're not.
"Why, you know, Bessie, or if you don't you will presently, that it was I who got mamma to send him a card; I felt rather sorry for him, that day at Mrs. Bevidge's, because she'd so obviously got him there to use him, and I got mamma to ask him.
At the first her daughter had not spoken to him, as might very well have happened, since Bessie Lynde had kept him away with her nearly all the time; but at the last she had bowed pleasantly to him across the room, and Jeff had responded with a stiff obeisance, whose coldness she felt the more for having been somewhat softened herself in Mrs. Bevidge's altruistic atmosphere.
Bevidge's note to pieces, and decided not to answer it at all, as the best way of showing how he had taken her invitation. But Mrs.
Bevidge's door, told him from her that he might walk home with her if he would not seem to do so. It was one of the pink evenings, dry and clear, that come in the Boston December, and they walked down the sidehill street, under the delicate tracery of the elm boughs in the face of the metallic sunset.
Lynde said he would like to know where she had picked the fellow up. She answered that she had picked him up, if that was the phrase he liked, at Mrs. Bevidge's; and then Alan swore a little, so as not to be heard by their aunt, who sat at the head of the table, and looked down its length between them, serenely ignorant, in her slight deafness, of what was going on between them.
Bevidge's benevolence was not wanting in courage; she believed that Jeff should pay his footing in society, such as it was, and should allow himself to be made use of, the first thing; when she had no reply from him, she wrote him again, asking him to an adjourned meeting of the first convocation, which had been so successful in everything but numbers.
"It seems to me," she said, "that where there are so many of you in the same boat, you might manage to get ashore somehow." "Yes, or all go down together." Jeff laughed, and ate Mrs. Bevidge's bread-and-butter, and drank her tea, with a relish unaffected by his refusal to do what she asked him.
Word Of The Day